


the art of losing isn't hard to master

by ChancellorGriffin



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst and Porn, Disposing of Bodies Is Messy Work, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s02e13 Chapter Twenty-Six: The Tell-Tale Heart, F/M, Hotel Sex, I Refuse to Call Them 'Falice' Their Name is 'Snakeparents', Nightmares, Past Alice Cooper/FP Jones II, Protective FP Jones II, Sharing a Bed, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-08-01 23:21:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16293842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: “'We take care of our own,' says FP Jones, placing a hand still reeking of sodium hydroxide over hers, and just for one moment, in the midst of the darkest night of her life, Alice Cooper wonders if everything she has ever lost is being restored to her piece by piece."





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [convenientmisfires](https://archiveofourown.org/users/convenientmisfires/gifts).



> **“One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop**
> 
> The art of losing isn’t hard to master;  
> so many things seem filled with the intent  
> to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
> 
> Lose something every day. Accept the fluster  
> of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.  
> The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
> 
> Then practice losing farther, losing faster:  
> places, and names, and where it was you meant  
> to travel. None of these will bring disaster . . .
> 
> —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture  
> I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident  
> the art of losing’s not too hard to master  
> though it may look like ( _Write_ it!) like disaster.

_**** _

_**i. "so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost"** _

Alice misplaces things, these days, more than she used to.

When she was young, she took ruthless, possessive care of the few things she owned that were precious to her, the way kids do when they grow up with nothing.  She had very few things to love, and she loved them all deeply, even though for most of her youth everything important could fit into one threadbare backpack.

(The girls have inherited this, she notices, though it's been transformed by Cooper-ness into a new, middle-class version.  With Elizabeth, it's her meticulous, organized brain that holds every scrap of data in its proper place. With Polly, it's the deep well of emotional connection that caused her to worry, as a child, that her teddy bear didn't like the washing machine or made her cry when it was time to throw away childhood clothes that didn't fit. Polly and Elizabeth do not misplace things.)

Hal gives her shit about it sometimes, in that infuriating tone that's calculated to sound playful but isn't: does she think the Coopers are _made_ of money, that she loses pens or reading glasses or sweaters so often that he can just _replace_ them?

(As though he doesn't know that this is exactly the power he had over her to begin with, the irresistible allure of being able to buy a new sweater instead of having to keep patching and mending an old one.  As though he doesn't remember how all of this started.)

Hal loves to remind Alice, in endless small ways, that it was Cooper money (well, Blossom money, she knows now) that bought and paid for every piece of their stable, comfortable life. It's important to his sense of self that Alice brought nothing to the table, that the house and everything in it are his.  (Everything is his except half the _Register_ , which is why it hurt so much worse to lose it than anything else; now, with everything around them crumbling, writing is the only proof besides her daughters that she's done anything worth doing with the past two decades of her life.)

For twenty years, Hal carefully groomed the wife he wanted, and for a long time she just let him do it.  An Alice whose emotions were as buttoned up as as her crisp white blouses, an Alice who always remembered to be grateful. After all, Hal had saved her. Had given her everything she thought she wanted, everything she thought happiness was made of. Other men, he likes to remind her when he's in his foulest moods, might have walked away, after Charles. Other men might not have married a girl stupid enough to let herself get pregnant that young.  "You can take the girl out of the Southside," he'd said to her once, when he was drunk and pissed at her, and she'd wanted to slap him but she also knew it was true. She'd married a Cooper but never really _become_ one.  It was just a name, a piece of paper, a tissue-thin veneer of Northside propriety over a wild Serpent girl's heart which Hal has always known was never really his, so he's never really stopped resenting it.

But she _was_ grateful.  Or, more accurately, she was heartbroken and desperate enough back then to halfway believe Hal when he told her she _ought_ to be grateful, and she really has tried to feel it.  She tried to be the Alice that Hal had wanted to marry.  An Alice full of potential to be a suitable Cooper wife. An Alice who made Hal’s family her family and Hal’s priorities her priorities, an Alice who never said no when Hal switched off the bedside lamp and rolled on top of her for one of his (decreasingly rare, and usually mercifully brief) bouts of routine, tedious lovemaking.

 It had been different in the beginning. He'd been living out his own kind of fantasy too, back then; where Alice was soothed by things like clean white countertops and a green lawn and joint checking, Hal was aroused by her pleasure in them.  Everything he gave her which she enjoyed, from bath salts to a decent car, was a reminder that she'd never had such things before and he was the first to offer them to her. Her happiness was a compliment to himself, the reward he received for taming her. It had excited him, back in those days, to have a woman like Alice in his bed, to possess her, to call her "wife."  What a hero he was in his own eyes, what a white knight, swooping in to rescue a dirty, broke Cinderella from the only kind of gritty, hardscrabble life the Southside - and its men - could offer her. 

Alice learned very quickly that the best way to get it over with was simply to yield, and let him have what he wanted.  At the beginning it was nice, to make someone feel so good, to feel so cherished; by the time it began to feel oppressive, she'd more or less mastered the technique of moving it along to a swift and efficient conclusion.  It was a waste of time attempting to make it enjoyable, all experimentation or variety only prolonged the inevitable, and it never improved the result.  So she lay on her back and gazed up at him with wide doe eyes and say “yes” when he grunted “aren’t you glad you married me?” as he thrust into her over and over, and said “thank you” as he shuddered and groaned and burst inside her, the way she knew he wanted.  Maybe five, six times over the course of their marriage he succeeded (essentially by accident) in making her come, but it was rarely worth it for the performance of additional gratitude that seemed expected of her after.  Best to keep it brief, help him along and then let him fall asleep and take advantage of the removable showerhead to finish herself off once he was snoring. Marriage to Hal required carefully managing him, in bed as much as anywhere else.

Sensuality, another thing she’s lost to the passage of the years, along with her taut teenage body and her memory of what freedom felt like. Young Alice had been fearless in bed, but Hal needed to feel like he’d tamed her.  Needed Charles, and the girl Alice had been when she’d given birth to Charles, out of the picture and out of their marriage. Needed a wife whose needs were modest and contained and could be filled by him entirely, so she would never go looking anywhere else.  By now it's been so long she’s forgotten what good sex felt like, forgotten it was ever something she used to enjoy.  All her senses were dulled, somehow, and only now - in the midst of all this new darkness, this fear and pain sweeping through their town - has she begun to remember that there's more to Alice than just an extension of her husband and daughters.

Permanence.  Stability.  Financial security. All the things Northsiders took for granted, which she'd envied and resented and coveted desperately, like a child pressing their nose against the glass of a toy store window.  Solid ground beneath her once-restless feet, that was the allure of Hal Cooper. Born into one of the founding families of the town.  There would always be Coopers in Riverdale. If she married Hal, she would know exactly who she was, for the rest of her life.  She would never have to go looking for anything again.

And after all, she thinks sometimes, it hadn't always been so bad. Hal was contained, kept his inner life to himself, so she taught herself to do it too.  It made it easier to coexist, and their fights grew more and more rare as Alice grew more and more placid.  Most of the time they were perfectly able to perform the role of the perfect Northside family so well that even their daughters believed it.

She had played the role of that Alice for so long that it had almost begun to feel real to her, the echoes of the fiery, tempestuous Southside girl she’d been now so far distant she could hardly hear them anymore.  And if she missed that girl sometimes, well, Hal clearly didn't, so if she wanted to stay married to Hal, there was no room for any of that.

But everything is different now.

Since Jason Blossom, since the Black Hood, since Chic, since everything.

No solid ground beneath her feet anymore, no perfect family portrait, no orderly social hierarchy.  Alice Cooper is changing, and so is Riverdale, and so are all the people she knows.

Alice has lost her marriage and her job, her daughter's trust and her son's childhood and her entire sense of direction.  Up is down, down is up, the Northside is plagued by murder and the Southside feels like home.  The Blossom empire has fallen while the Lodges' is rising.  Hal is gone, Polly is drifting away, Betty hangs out with Serpents now.  Everything is different.  She can't recognize anyone anymore, even herself.

FP Jones is the only person in the world who stayed right where she left him.

* * *

 This is how it happens, the night everything goes wrong.  She looks down at the body on the floor, blood soaking into the lush cream-and-white carpet she'd picked out herself, and looks back up at her son, eyes wide with a blind animal panic, and she thinks to herself:

_I am done losing things._

So she takes a deep breath and she pulls the yellow dishwashing gloves out from beneath the sink and she goes to war against the universe that insists on taking and taking and taking without giving her anything back.  _Not this time.  Not again._   She will not lose Chic twice.  She will not go to jail.  She will not surrender one more piece of herself to this town, to this life, to this world. 

She is done letting things slip through her fingers without fighting for them, simply because Hal Cooper spent two decades telling her not to.

It's the worst betrayal of her marriage she can imagine, to let blood and death taint the clean middle-class purity of the house and life they built together, and yet even inside the depths of that horror there's a flicker of something like . . . what? Light? Freedom? The memory of the girl she used to be, slowly rising to the surface. If she'd really, truly become the Alice she'd convinced Hal she was - if she'd turned into an actual Cooper - she would have screamed or fainted or called Sheriff Keller, and then what would become of Chic? 

This is what happens, down there on the floor, up to her elbows in a stranger's blood: she finally finds herself again.

Hal would not kill to protect his children, she thinks. But now Alice knows that she would.

“We take care of our own,” says FP Jones, who also would, as he rests a hand still reeking of sodium hydroxide over hers, and just for one moment - in the midst of the darkest moment of her life - Alice Cooper wonders if everything she has ever lost is being restored to her piece by piece.

FP does not look at her with horror or condescending disapproval, the way Hal would do sometimes after even a minor infraction.  He does not grill her, does not ask anything more than what he needs to know to finish the job quietly and keep everyone safe.  He has every right to be so much angrier at her than he is for the danger Jughead is in now (even though it was Betty who brought him in, not Alice but none of this is Betty's fault).  A Northside parent would. She likes Fred Andrews, she likes Sheriff Keller, but neither of them would have done what FP did.

When  she was a kid, the Northside had seemed like paradise to her. Safe, clean streets. Lawns and front porches and big green trees. The very sky seemed bluer, over there.  Marrying a Northside man and getting out was the dream.  It was supposed to make her happy.  It was supposed to keep her safe.  It was supposed to be the kind of place where things like this never happened, where her life would be bridge clubs and sweater sets and PTA meetings forever.  That was what she'd thought she wanted.

Smoke and mirrors, all of it.

Here in this diner booth, with FP’s hand on hers, the rose-red glow of neon lights shining all around them, she realizes she feels safer now than she has anytime in the past twenty years.

_We take care of our own._

Not just his son, he means.  Alice too.

* * *

  _ **ii. "losing farther, losing faster"** _

It's over.

The corpse, the car, the mess, Hal, the stranger's phone . . . everything has been dealt with, disposed of.  Alice doesn't know if she'll ever be able to sleep through the night again without dreaming the horrible intermingled smell of blood and bleach, but at least she knows none of them are going to jail. The exhaustion of the past few days is beginning to close in, held at bay by adrenaline but she knows she doesn't have long before she crashes completely, and she can tell both the kids are in the same boat.

FP seems a different kind of tired, a weariness that goes down to the bone, entering the diner with the slow shambling trudge of a man weighed down by his own sins.  But it's a kind of tired she suspects he lives with all the time.  He won't fall apart at the end of the day, like the rest of them might. 

He does, however, need a shower, and _badly._

It's not merely a matter of the unpleasantness - though it's a truly vile stench, worse than blood and bleach - but more urgently, of safety.  It's a perilously distinctive and recognizable odor.  What if Sheriff Keller comes in tomorrow morning for breakfast and overhears a casual mention from Pop that the Jones boys and the Cooper girls were here together late last night, smelling like a chemical explosion?

The easiest solution would just be to take Betty home and send Jughead and FP on their way so he can wash up at home, so the trail never leads back to the Coopers.  If Keller comes knocking on the door of the trailer, FP and Jughead won't sell them out.  But it becomes clear very quickly that the kids are badly rattled, and they'd prefer to stay together, and maybe Betty's safer in the trailer after all than she would be in the house whose address Chic has given out to so many terrifying people.  Hal would disapprove of Betty spending the night with Jughead, and on a different day Alice would too, or at least would have put up more of a fight, but she doesn't have the energy for it tonight.  So she lets them go.  Jughead proved himself, after all; he's in this with them too.  He won't let any harm come to Betty. Maybe if they're lucky, they'll both be able to get some sleep.

She could, she supposes, offer FP the use of her own shower, and invite him to stay over on the sofa or in Polly's room, since Chic shouldn't be left alone all night either, but the thought of FP and Chic in the same house together makes her want to break down in tears. She can't tell him tonight, she can't give him _that_ to carry tonight, on top of the other burden he's already carrying for her, but could she lie to either of them, if they noticed? If they asked? If one of them, somehow, against all odds, put the pieces together?

(This is the truth about Chic which she has been fighting desperately not to face, the dark sorrow she is hiding beneath chocolate chip pancakes and photo albums and tea:

She wanted to look into her son's eyes and see his father, and she can't.

It had sustained her for so long, the thought that somewhere in the world there was a boy who was half FP and half Alice, and that maybe the Sisters had done what they promised and found a family who would be able to give him a good life, the kind of life his parents hadn't been lucky enough to be born into and certainly couldn't give him then.  But none of that had happened.  She's trying so hard to see herself in him, to see FP in him, every time she looks in his eyes, but she doesn't, and it breaks her heart.  She isn't stupid, it isn't that she's blind to what Betty sees, but she's only had a few days to cram in twenty-five years of mothering, to try and love him back into the person he could have become if everything had turned out differently. 

She just wishes she could see his father in him.  It might have healed things, at least a little, if she'd been able to see it.  And FP is sharp, FP might read it on her face, might know that something is wrong, and if he asks she can't not tell him, which means they can't go back to the Cooper house.)

So the motel it is.

* * *

 Alice goes along with nothing on her mind except the desire not to be alone, and the feeling that as long as FP is within her line of vision, she’s safe from ghosts.  Anything else that two people who aren't each other's spouses might be doing checking into a motel late at night genuinely doesn't cross her mind.  Not on a night like tonight.  FP doesn't question her decision to join him and doesn't read anything into it either, though he's prudent enough to ensure that they're careful arriving.  He gets their first, checks in alone, _room for one please,_ makes some amused small talk with the desk clerk about letting his son and his girlfriend have some privacy in the trailer, is careful to mention something about helping out with a delivery of fertilizer and chemical supplies earlier today, and gets a key for a room on the nearly-empty side of the motel facing into the parking lot.

Alice leaves her car two blocks away and walks over to meet him.

He’s already in the shower when she lets herself into the door he’s left ajar.  She locks and bolts it behind her, sits down on the bed, fidgets for a few minutes, then abruptly gets back up again and grabs the wooden desk chair and shove it under the dingy brass knob, bracing the whole door shut.

Then she sits back down again.

She knows she should call Chic. She knows she should go home, to make sure he’s okay. He needs his mother right now, and she isn't supposed to be here.

But God, she's so, so tired, more tired than she thinks she's ever been in her life, and she's already done things she could never have imagined doing in order to take care of Chic, things that are crushing her under their exhausting weight, which feels ever so slightly lighter now that FP is on her side.  And there are two beds, so she wouldn't be in the way, and she knows she'll sleep sounder if she isn't alone.

She'll just take her shoes off, she thinks, stepping out of them and leaving them by the shabby old wooden desk in the corner, then takes off her coat and purse to set them down too.  Then her socks, then her pants, then her blouse, almost without thinking.  She folds them neatly and leaves them on the desk with her coat.  She's so tired, and this night has been so surreal and disorienting already, that she doesn't think anything of being in someone else's hotel room in her bra and underwear except how nice it feels to be comfortable. 

She doesn't see FP's clothes or shoes anywhere - they must be in the bathroom with him - but he's left his keys and wallet and phone on the bed closest to the door, claiming it as his own, which feels very like him somehow.  Alice claims the bed next to the closet, on the inside wall, farthest from the door and window, and climbs in, wondering whether Hal - were he in FP's place - would take the outside bed too, or leave it for her.

He's always had a healthy self-preservation instinct, her husband.  She thinks she knows the answer.

The mattress is thin and cheap, she can feel each coil shift beneath her weight with a low metallic _sproing_ noise every time she moves, and the sheets smell like mothballs, but she doesn’t care.  Northside Alice would call the clerk and demand to speak to a manager to request a cleaner pillowcase that still looked actually white instead of a vague milky yellow; but Southside Alice slept on so many worse beds than this.  The motel seemed like luxury, when she was a kid.  And besides, it's impossible to worry about how inferior this bed is to the plush memory foam mattress she could be sleeping in at home when her whole body is so drowsy she can't even move anymore.  The sound of the shower running is endlessly soothing, and through the crack FP left in the bathroom door - not as an invitation, but as a security measure, so he can hear if she calls for him - she can smell warm, fragrant steam scented with cheap motel room shampoo, coconut and some kind of generic attempt at fruit.

Heaven.

The proximity of FP's extremely naked body is something that, on another night, in another life, would definitely be a matter of more significance, but it doesn't even register now, not really.  Everything is being slowly swallowed up by fog.  She closes her eyes.  She wonders if she will be able to sleep without nightmares tonight, something that has eluded her since Jason first disappeared.  (“If it could happen to a Blossom, it could happen to any of our children,” she remembers Sierra McCoy saying once, and the fear never left any of them.)

But she’s safe here, there are two bolts and a chair keeping the door bolted shut and FP will sleep between her and the window, so maybe tonight, she will finally . . .

. . .

. . .

When FP opens the door ten minutes later, naked except for a towel wrapped around his waist, steam still rising off his body, Alice is sound asleep.

* * *

FP stands there for a few moments, watching her chest under the covers rise and fall, her breath even and relaxed and steady.  She's definitely asleep.  Really, truly asleep, not playing coy and waiting up for him, but out like a light until morning.

He takes a long time deciding.

His things were on one bed, and she chose the other, which feels like a signal for No.  But she’s also curled up onto only one of the pillows, as though leaving space for a second person to take the other, which could be a signal for Yes . . . or could simply be a remnant of habit from decades of marriage, that her body simply does that automatically now.

He calculates the odds of an intruder finding them, which would make it safer for Alice if he was near the door (slim, to be honest; he knows they weren't followed, and anyone searching for them would go to either the trailer, which the Serpents are keeping an eye on for him, or to the Cooper house, where no one is home except the creepy kid he can't bring himself to worry about that much), and then calculates the odds of Alice waking in the middle of the night with a panic attack (he remembers this from the old days, her nightmares were always particularly vivid), and in the end, that's what makes the decision for him.

Better to be close enough for Alice to reach him.  He'll still be between her and the door.

He dumped his clothes in the shower with him to rinse off, but it wasn't enough to purge the chemical stench, so he's left them in the bathtub, soaking in shampoo and all the liquid soap from the sink.  All of it - shoes, socks, underwear, everything.  Jughead will have to bring him a change of clothes in the morning.

So there’s no help for it - the towel is all he’s got.

He climbs into the bed beside Alice, a modest and discreet distance away from her, his body a wall between her and danger, and it's all suddenly so familiar that his whole body aches.  He closes his eyes, but he can’t turn his mind off. Sleep feels too far away.

But she needs it more than he does, tonight.  She’s the one who took the bigger leap, with further to fall.  So he lies back against the thin, shitty mattress, and he breathes in the scent of Alice - shampoo and perfume and sweat all mixed together, a kind of spicy floral musk that cleanses the last ghost of sodium hydroxide from his nostrils - and he lets her sleep.

* * *

  _ **iii. "where it was you meant to travel"** _

He doesn't fall asleep, not really, not all the way, just drifts in and out, so when the thing he was braced for happens a few hours later, he's ready instantly.

 _"Charles,"_ she chokes out, sitting bolt upright, gasping for breath, but he's right there beside her, sitting up to rest a gentle hand on her bare shoulder, murmuring reassurances.

“It’s okay.  Alice, you’re safe.  We’re okay. You’re okay.  It’s just me. You’re safe, girl, you hear me?  I got you. I’m right here.”

It takes a minute.

Then, “FP?” she whispers, voice fragile, shaky, turning to him with bleary and confused eyes, as though she’s forgotten where she is and how he's come to be there beside her.

“I’m right here,” he says again, as steadily as he can, letting his strength flow into her until she can find her own again.  “You’re safe. It’s okay.”

She doesn’t have to recount it for him, the tangle of sinister visions - iron prison bars clanging shut, chemicals boiling the flesh off bones, rivers of blood running through her living room.  He knows everything he needs to know just from looking at her face.  He doesn't ask any more questions than he needs to here, either. He just holds her, letting her collapse bonelessly against his shoulder until she goes soft, and stops shaking.

In the years since they parted, Alice Cooper had transformed herself into a prim and formal Northside wife, a pillar of the community, and - most significantly - an enemy of the Serpents, while he was the same man he'd always been except with a prison record.  Before the whole social hierarchy of Riverdale turned upside down, he would never have permitted himself to touch her like this.  Even putting his hand over hers in the diner had felt like such a daring escalation that he'd half expected her to slap him.  But all the walls are down tonight, and all the rules are different now, and this Alice is as familiar to him as Hal Cooper’s cold, stiff wife was distant.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers hoarsely.  “I’m so sorry, FP, for all of it, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry . . .”

“Hey,” he says firmly, shaking her a little, pulling back and placing his hands squarely on both her shoulders to look her straight in the eye.  “Listen to me. We do what we have to do to protect our kids. Always. If Chic were my son, I’d have done the same thing.”

Something happens to her face at those words, something dark and sad that he doesn’t understand, and he watches her begin to crumple, tears shining in the corners of her eyes.  The sight of it causes his heart to twist painfully inside his chest, and he moves in closer, lets his hands drift from her shoulders to cradle her jaw.  He’s only trying to give her comfort, he’s still not thinking about anything else, she’s still Alice Cooper and not his for the taking, it never even _occurs_ to him, he’s a good man (or trying to be, at least); so he doesn’t touch her, or even look at her, any way he wouldn’t let himself if Betty and Jughead were there.  He just brushes the tangled blonde hair back from her eyes and lets his hands cup her face and murmurs “it’s okay, it’s okay, Alice, it’s gonna be okay,” over and over and over again.

When the air in the room shifts, becoming charged with electricity, it doesn’t begin with him.  It begins with _her._

Shoulders trembling, blinking back tears, she turns her head to one side, ever so slightly, to where his hand is still resting against her cheek, and brushes his palm with her lips.  It’s so swift and faint he almost doesn’t realize what’s happened, until she looks back at him, and he stops breathing.

There it is, there inside her eyes.

Something he hasn't seen in more than twenty years.

It’s like a lightswitch flipping on.  He sees everything at once, all the things he wouldn't let himself look at before when he was trying so hard to be good.  Her smooth, peaches-and-cream skin that seems hardly to have aged a day, the slope of her bare shoulders, the swell of her breasts inside her gray cotton bra.  (It’s not a sexy bra, it’s a regular bra, made for Tuesdays and sweaters and ordinary nights where nothing happens. She didn’t leave the house prepared for any of this, which makes all of it more complicated but somehow more real.)  

He feels his cheeks flush, he feels how warm her skin is against his, and he’s suddenly very, very aware of the towel around his waist that’s the only barrier between them.

“Alice,” he says, swallowing hard, not quite sure how to continue that sentence, but this time she’s more deliberate, lifting his palm to her mouth and kissing it again.

FP Jones has done terrible things with these hands.  He’s hurt people with them. Committed crimes with them.  They aren’t worthy to touch the clean white skin of the Alice Cooper who’d lived in that ivory tower with Hal for all those years, the Alice who needed to believe she was better than all the rest of them.  But right now they're the only thing in the world that _this_ Alice wants, the only thing that can give her a real kind of comfort, and it feels like she's holding out the past and present together in the palm of her hand for him to take.

So he kisses her, and realizes immediately that he hasn't stopped wanting this for one single moment since the very first time.

FP has scoured his body head to toe, scalded himself red and raw under the hot water, scrubbing and scrubbing with four different washcloths to get every last whiff of the chemical stench out of his skin, hair, teeth, under his fingernails, inside his nostrils, stinging at the corner of his eyes.  Now he smells like he's made of soap, every inch of him warm and clean.  Alice, conversely, smells just a little bit like sweat underneath her perfume and her mouth still tastes very faintly like the strawberry milkshake she only took a few sips of at Pop's, which she'd only ordered so she'd have something to do with her hands.  Still clean and soft and sweet, but with just a faint hint of an edge of something . . . maybe not quite perfect.  Something real.  Human.  Just enough so she feels like the Alice he kissed the first time, and not the Alice who married Hal.

 _His_ Alice, a treasonous part of his brain thinks, as his mouth moves on hers, muffling her soft, breathy gasp, licking into her with a boldness that surprises even himself.

FP doesn't have a hard time getting women, not to be an asshole about it or anything.  Serpent girls have always been drawn to him, and it's always been more of a question about how to keep them at arm's length, not how to get their attention and keep it.  That's never been his problem.  But this game he's been playing with Alice since the minute he got out of jail - since the minute she arched that eyebrow and decided to try to shock him with a saucy little quip that was her way of apologizing for the whole "thinking he was a murderer" business - has gotten under his skin, and he doesn't even realize how much until her hands reach out to grip his shoulders and then slide up to tangle in his still-damp hair, and that's when he knows the game's over.

He's got her, if he wants her.

And God knows she's got him.

(Though she probably knew that already.)

There's a lot of reasons why it was always gonna have to be Alice who made the first move, why it's always been Alice who had more at stake here, Alice who had further to fall.  With the exception of Jughead and Jellybean, there ain't much in FP's life he wouldn't mind parting with if he had to.  He's always been good at making the best of things. Towns change, and things break, and people leave you, and life goes on, and only idiots cry over the shit they can't change.  But Alice isn't wired that way.  Alice has claws and teeth, Alice digs in and holds on, Alice always held her backpack in her lap on the bus instead of setting it on the seat beside her so it was never out of her grip, Alice won't lose anything if she can help it. 

And Alice has a lot to lose here.

FP might have to deal with some mutters and whispers if it got around that he'd spent the night with Alice, and it would make things a little weird for Jughead and Betty, but it wouldn't unravel his whole life the way it could hers.

So it _means_ something, that she's reaching out through the shards of her world crumbling all around her and she's holding onto him with both hands.

It means she's for real.

This is for real.

He pulls away to catch his breath, closing his eyes, forehead dropping against hers, letting her comb her fingers gently through his damp hair, parting it at the side and raking a dark lock forward at a steep angle.

"There," she says, pulling her hands away, and he opens his eyes to see her appraising him with a playful grin tugging at the corner of her lips.  "That's how you used to wear it. All messy and hanging over your eye.  Like that."

"You givin' me a makeover?" he asks her dubiously.  "In bed?"

"I just missed that face is all," she teases him, then gently lifts her hand and combs it back from his forehead, the way he wears it now, smoothing it gently with the back of her knuckle.  "But I like this face, too."

"Do you, now."

"I do."

"Wanna show me how much?"

The tone is light but the invitation is sincere, and she takes him up on it instantly, cupping his jaw in her hands and letting her lips brush lightly, delicately, tantalizingly over his before her tongue nudges his apart and slips softly inside, and the difference between kissing Alice and being kissed _by_ Alice is unfathomable.  He lets her have her way with him for a good long while before he lets his hands slide from her shoulders down her sides, then up her back, where he plucks lightly at the clasp of her bra, not to open it but just to get her attention, and then waits.  She nods him onward immediately, breathless, not even breaking stride, sighing into his mouth as he slides the little metal hooks open, and then with one soft movement she's open before him.  And she doesn't wait for him to get up the courage, she seizes his hands in hers and moves them to where she wants them herself, mouthing _"please"_ against his lips as his palms settle comfortably over the swell of her perfect breasts.

"Alice," he whispers, and takes them both down onto the mattress, her soft body a pillow beneath his, her slim arms circling his back, her thighs opening to make room for his as his body settles against her, and then everything goes blurry around the edges for a long, long time.


	2. Chapter 2

  

_**iv. "a gesture i love"** _

Time slows, and stops, but neither of them notice.

It's all breath and skin and gentle sighs, the taste of her strawberry milkshake and the rasp of his stubble against her smooth throat and the way the sweet pink flesh of her areola pebbles at the touch of his callused thumb lightly circling it, and everything exists in the space between remembrance and discovery.  Their bodies were different the last time, and they were different people, and an infinite number of things have changed, and on both sides there's something like shyness.  Maybe the slope of her stomach and hips will be softer than he remembers it, not sleek and taut like it was before the birth of three children.  Maybe his back and knees aren't what they used to be and she'll notice the soft _"oof"_ he can't quite suppress as she loops her thigh around his hip to roll him over. 

 _Maybe,_ she thinks, _he'll be disappointed that I'm not the old Alice._

 _Maybe,_ he thinks, _she'll wish she was with the old FP instead._

But then there's the giddy joy of familiarity, of all the things they remember, all the little joys that were always right where they left them.  The tattoo on Alice's thigh still feels as good beneath his hands as it did the day she came home with it.  (A surprise, of sorts; the other girls went for shoulders and forearms and lower backs, but Alice had hers placed right where FP most liked to touch her, right where his hand would naturally come to rest as their bodies settled into each other before falling asleep.)  He's wondered, from time to time over the years, if she would have removed it.  If Hal would have made her.  If she would have wanted it gone.  Finding it again causes a knife of joy so fierce it's almost pain to slice his chest open, and he can't take his hand away after that, burying his mouth in her throat as one hand caresses her nipple into a peak of aching hardness, and the other traces the outline of the serpent he knows entirely by memory.

"I've missed this," she whispers into his hair.  "I like it when you touch me there.  I've missed it so much.  Don't stop."

(It's so different from being in bed with Hal, his hand on her thigh, clammy and possessive, gripping the serpent beneath his hand as a reminder to himself that he'd tamed it.  Nobody has touched her like this in such a long time.  Nobody has run their fingertips along the curving outline of the snake on her thigh, making her shiver, making her ache with wetness and yearning, since the last time FP did it himself.)

When his head dips from her shoulder to the hollow between her breasts, then kisses its way down her belly, she catches her breath.  Is he . . . will he really . . . no one has -

 _"Oh!"_ she inhales sharply, clutching frantically at his shoulders, as a warm mouth seals itself over the damp cotton of her panties, mustache and beard tantalizing her through the fabric, nose nudging softly into her flesh. 

To this day, FP is the only man who has ever done this to her.  He was the first, and Hal never wanted to, though she wouldn't have encouraged it anyway.  It would have felt, strangely, like a violation.  Like letting Hal into a place only FP belonged.

Her body starts to tremble with anticipation as he gently tugs at at the elastic waistband.  Instantly her hips lift off the bed to help him pull them off more easily.  He tosses both discarded bra and soaked panties with a casual grace over onto the other bed before returning to Alice, sliding his hands up the insides of her thighs to part them.

"You sure," he starts to say before he lets himself dive in, before he crosses that line completely, but her whole body is one aching _yes._   She bites her lip, a flush sweeping her cheeks, and nods vigorously, hand lifting to caress his hair again, which he leans into like a contented animal.  Hot Dog does this sometimes, plays hard to get when you want to scratch him between the ears before returning and nudging impatiently at your hand, demanding to be petted.  Alice strokes his hair over and over, with the kind of indulgent, affectionate sweetness nobody else has ever really shown FP Jones in all his life except for her, causing shivers to roll down his bare spine as he lowers his head and gets to work.

The taste of her is the same and different, the way everything about Alice twenty-five years later is the same and different.  But it's still her body, and he still knows it better than any man has ever known it, and here inside this perfect bubble where the hellish nightmare of this day - of the rest of the world - doesn't exist anymore, he's delighted by familiarity, and holds onto it tightly, anchored by memory.  The way it feels to wrap his lips around the gleaming pink pearl of her clit is exactly the same, but the way she arches up off the bed with a shocked gasp is new.  (He was clean-shaven the last time.)  His tongue moves lazily up and down the seam of her as she squirms and wriggles impatiently beneath him - this part's exactly the same too, and makes him chuckle a little - hips lifting and lifting as though she can trick him into making him give her more, as though she's still in charge.

(He wonders how long it's been since Alice let anyone else take charge of anything.)

He stays there until she's shaking, until the murmured incantation of his name has become intermingled with low, whispered curses and the soft caress of her fingers in his hair has turned to frantic clutching, and only then does he let her come, tongue swirling circles around her clit as one hand slides up the inside of her thigh to slip two fingers wetly inside her, and then it's just a few twisting, curling, beckoning strokes before she comes apart completely, shuddering and gasping and breathless.

He kisses his way back up to her mouth and her thighs open wide to cradle him between them, to hold his body against her own, as he sinks down, kissing her mouth, lips and beard still damp and warm and sticky, as her arms lift to wrap tight around his back.  The towel has long since come untied so his skin is all bared to her, and her hands glide up and down his back greedily, from the sharp angled wings of his shoulderblades to the hard, muscular slope of his ass.  He remembers this, too, the way she always liked him on top so she could trace delicate little fingertips along the ridges of his spine, feeling the movement of his whole body against her hands.

"It's been such a long time," says Alice, about a hundred different meanings crowded into those five ordinary words, somehow pleading and apologizing and confessing and inviting all at once, and he doesn't know how to answer her with words so he just moves between her thighs and slides deep inside her, where they find the last lost thing.

Alice pulls his head down to rest against her shoulder as he moves against her - partly the desire for closeness but mostly so he won't see the tears. She squeezes her eyes closed, willing them back down, but they're coming from some deep, long-buried place she can't control, like a safety valve has been released and all the pent-up pressure rushes out.  It's just so good to _feel_   again, but she doesn't know if she can explain it to him without the moment being ruined because of how badly she doesn't want to think about Hal or talk about Hal or remember Hal even exists.  But it's impossible not to think about all the years of all the nights lying on their white linen wedding sheets as he grunted and pushed, and she halfheartedly encouraged him with feigned pleasure sounds to move the process along, practicing detachment so each time it was a little easier not to mind.  She's spent decades forgetting the way this felt.  So much safer, not to want things, if you can't have them again.  One more piece of the past, lost forever.

But it's not gone.  She's not dead.  She hasn't lost him.

She really had thought this whole part of her life was over.  The idea of it all seemed so impossible.

And yet here he is.

She's completely forgotten everything that happened in the past twenty-four hours to bring them to this moment, everything outside this bed is a blur.  She doesn't remember why his hair is wet except that she likes it, doesn't remember why they're in a motel except that it's a very convenient miracle that they are.  She isn't thinking about Chic or Betty or Jughead, she isn't thinking about blood and bones, she's just pressing back stinging tears of pure, clean joy as her whole body stirs from slumber and she remembers what pleasure feels like, how it feels to be wanted.

FP moves inside her with purposeful care, never too hard or too soft, never too fast or too slow, but always perfectly attuned to her.  He's gentle without being hesitant and assertive without being domineering.  His mouth is hot on her neck and his shoulderblades are iron-sharp beneath her hands and he's covered in scars she doesn't remember, and Alice thinks she would trade another twenty-five years with Hal just to have this again at the end of it.

"I missed you so much, Alice," he whispers hoarsely into the hollow below her ear, as his hips rise and fall against hers, as he pushes her open and fills her up, and with any other man she'd think he just meant this, but with FP there's always the thing on the surface and then half a dozen things he isn't saying.  What's hidden inside those words about _his_ last twenty-five years, about Gladys, about Penny Peabody, about the long stretches of nights he spent alone? Maybe, after all, things weren't so different for them both.

She lifts one thigh to wrap it around his body and pull him in closer, impatient, and he gets the picture. "Bossy," he observes with amusement, kissing his way across her collarbone. "You wanna get on top and take over, be my guest. You know I always liked it that way."

"I remember," she says, and he must hear it in her voice because his head snaps up, pulling him away from letting his tongue graze the swell of her breasts. 

'You crying?" he asks suddenly, voice warm and urgent, pulsing with concern.  "Alice, you okay?"

"I'm okay," she tries to say, but her voice breaks and gives her away.  He pulls out of her, sits up on his elbow, regarding her with worry, but she waves it off.  "I'm okay.  I'm okay.  I'm just . . ."  She stops for a moment.  "I don't know.  _Happy."_

He gets it immediately, relaxing.  "Me too," he agrees, running his fingertip down the soft skin of her shoulder.  "Fucking weird, isn't it?"

"Should we feel guilty?"

"No," he responds without hesitation.  "Nuh-uh.  Absolutely not.  We've been living in a nightmare, we deserve a little happy.  One night, before everything crashes back down again."

"What happens tomorrow?" she whispers. 

He shakes his head.  "Don't ask me that," he says softly.  "Don't ask me, girl, 'cause I don't know, and I don't think I have an answer you'll like."

She nods.  She doesn't want to talk about this anymore. They've already let the real world intrude further than she wants.  So she grips his hard, sun-browned shoulders in her elegant manicured fingers and pushes him down onto his back, letting her thighs straddle him, and she lets herself be completely, wildly, utterly selfish for the first time in years.  She lowers herself back down onto his cock, savoring the sweet, sweet ache of it filling her up, and she takes everything she wants, as much as she wants, as hard as she wants, until she can't take anymore.

 _"Fuck_ , Alice," FP chokes out a low groan as her hands plant hard on his chest, fingertips digging into his pectoral muscles so fiercely that the skin around them turns pale from the pressure, and she feels a rush of joy surge through her at the _want_ in his voice.  She takes him deeper, letting her hips roll slow and deep before she finally takes him in all the way and begins to ride him in earnest.

The first slam of the flimsy bedframe against the wall takes them both by surprise, and FP's grin at the sharp sound is merry and wicked.  "That all you got?" he asks her skeptically.  "That didn't even make a dent."

"Nobody's supposed to know we're here, FP," she reminds him.  "We were trying not to draw attention to ourselves."

"No one's in that room," he points out.  "I think we're safe."

"Is that right."

He winks up at her from the pillow, and gives her round ass a light, teasing spank.  "Go on, then," he prods her teasingly.  "What else you got?"

And after that, well.  How can she resist?

The talking and teasing dies away after that, to be replaced by the low, dull slam of headboard against wall and two voices tangled together in rhythmic harmony, raw baritone groans tangled with soft, fluttering exhalations.  Alice feels pressure building up and building up inside her, hard and fierce and aching, and she loses herself as her body moves on top of his.  But the pressure doesn't release, the orgasm doesn't come, it just keeps expanding inside her forever like a bubble, and just when it's gone on for so long that she gives up and thinks to herself, _what the hell, I can live without it_ , FP's hand slides up between their bodies and finds her clit and _oh holy fuck,_ all he has to do is rub a few gentle circles with his thumb and then she's _gone,_ they plummet over the cliff together, FP gritting out a choked gasp as his hips stutter against hers, filling and filling and filling her as a tidal wave rushes through her body and lights her up, one hard deep orgasm followed by a cascade of aftershocks as his thumb keeps circling her clit.  Finally she collapses onto his chest, trembling damp tendrils of hair clinging to her brow and temples and the nape of her neck, and lets his hard, sweat-sheened arms envelop her completely.

"Well," says FP, once he's finally caught his breath.  "Sure nice to know we've still got it."

"Like riding a bike," Alice says with a perfectly straight face, causing him to hoot with laughter.

"You probably haven't done _that_ in a damn long time either."

"Well, I'm willing to let you give me lessons again," she says, "if you have a second helmet, and I don't have to do anything except sit behind you and hold on."

"All there is to it," he agrees, as she curls up into his chest, wrapping his arms around her even more tightly.  "Just hold onto me, don't let go, and everything's gonna be fine."

"I wish I had," she says almost inadvertently, the words tumbling out as though they surprise even her.  FP flinches, stunned, like she's slapped him in the face.  Alice ducks her head into his shoulder, and can't look at him.  "I wish I had," she says again.  I won't make the same mistake twice. I don't want to lose you again."

"You won't," he murmurs into her hair.  "The past is the past, baby, we can't change it.  But we're here now and I ain't goin' anywhere."

She nods, burrowing in closer, letting herself feel small and soft, letting herself release the years of tension and fatigue, letting go of always having to try so hard to keep everything that matters from slipping through her grasp, and she lets herself be held.  It's strange, to be the lost thing that's come back to someone else, to be the thing they're wrapping up tightly in their arms because they know that at any moment the things that matter most in the world can steal away in the night and leave you.  FP holds Alice like a miracle returning, and she sinks into his warmth like his body is home, because it turns out - and they know this, now - that nothing was ever really lost at all.


End file.
